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if another bidder has bid $1, you can enter the auction with 2$ and promise the other bidder $2 if you win the auction.

1evand13y

And then the other bidder bids $3, and promises to give you $1 if he wins the auction. It seems you still haven't avoided the problem of privileging one player's choices.

A Parable On Obsolete Ideologies

Tasky13y00

thank you for this great article.

I Was Not Almost Wrong But I Was Almost Right: Close-Call Counterfactuals and Bias

Tasky13y20

You used the terms "high-need-for-closure" and "low-need-for-closure" quite a lot in you essay. Would you mind explaining what they mean and/or linking to somewhere I can look up the definition, since I am not familiar with them?

Could you maybe also explain what those tests are and how they work (the ones to measure need for closure)?

2Kaj_Sotala13y

I quoted this excerpt from Tetlock (1998) in the post, did you not find it helpful? The papers I referenced (see the end of the post for links) briefly discuss how this was measured. For instance, Tetlock 1998: Incidentally, Tetlock 1998 also used another measure that's theoretically different from need-for-closure, namely integrative complexity. Tetlock 1998 found the results between the two measures of need-for-closure and integrative complexity to be highly similar, in that individuals with a high need-for-closure scored low on integrative complexity, and vice versa. He combined the results of the two measures to a single variable in analyzing the results of that study. IIRC, in later studies only need-for-closure was used.

My Algorithm for Beating Procrastination

Tasky13y10

You should try to estimate as good as possible (i.e. without falling into fallacies) for yourself. Then you can still decide it's best to lie (a.k.a. self-promote). But getting false information won't do you any good.

Hearsay, Double Hearsay, and Bayesian Updates

Tasky13y20

Thanks for this article. I now finally start to understand the sense behind the judge/jury system, which I always found a little strange (compared to just a qualified judge making the whole decision).

Avoid misinterpreting your emotions

Tasky13y-10

Positive emotions, too, can be correct or mistaken.

it's lines like this that make me a little uneasy about your essay. If you say that sometimes emotions are worth listening too and sometimes not, doesn't this imply that they are quite worthless as an advisor? If they are wrong roughly the same amount as they are right, that does not mean that they are "half good" it means they totally fail, as a coinflip would give you the same result. Shouldn't it then be the conclusion that one should just ignore emotion all together and rethink issues from... (read more)

8Swimmer963 (Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg) 13y

Even if it was 50%, noticing and then re-evaluating your emotional 'advisor' won't have the same result as ignoring it. For example, if 50% of your bad moods are because of random brain-chemistry imbalances, and 50% indicate a problem, you can either ignore all bad moods, or notice all bad moods and then go look for problems that might be causing them. In which case you'll find a potentially fixable problem 50% of the time, and no apparent cause the other 50%. So at the cost of more energy spent on thought and emotion-evaluation, you can catch some problems in your life that you might not have noticed otherwise. This would still be true even if only 25% of bad moods were in response to a fixable problem: there would be a higher cost of emotion-evaluation relative to payoff in problem-discovery, but the result would still be different than if you just ignored the bad moods.

5Kaj_Sotala13y

If ithey were never any better than a coinflip, then yes, you might as well ignore them completely. But they're not always wrong - like I mentioned in my post, my emotions seem to generally have been right when they've been warning me not to trust someone. So you should figure out when your emotions are right and when they're wrong, and then either listen to them or ignore them based on their historical track record in similar situations. Yes, it can pay off to briefly consider alternative explanations even in situations when your emotions have usually been correct or when they've usually been incorrect. And if the stakes are really high, you might be best off spending some extra time thinking about the issue regardless. But that doesn't make emotions different from any other source of information. Even if you got advice from an intelligent and exceptionally rational friend whose advice had always been correct so far, it would still be a good idea to spend a moment checking the argument for flaws before relying on it in some very high-stakes decision.

Religion's Claim to be Non-Disprovable

Tasky14y10

Sorry for double post. Actually I did think about this again and I think there is a way to almost disprove what I said above.

I think what can and will be disproven is the idea of "Soul". Basically we already know about a lot of connections not only between brain and body function (like "which are is correlated to which operations") but we know some things about correlation brain-personality! (If you want a really good introduction on brain-mind correlations that is not overly technical, see "The Brain and the Inner World: An Introd... (read more)

Religion's Claim to be Non-Disprovable

Tasky14y10

What happens however, if one simply goes at the very core of monotheism and states "God exists, created the Universe (by Big Bang if you like), from which life arose because he built the laws of physics that way. And he will someday end the universe and create a new one with only the souls he judges good." What part of that can one disprove exactly? I'm not saying it is a valid theory, it isn't exactly because it can't be disproven. I don't know you, but the christians I know don't use the bible as their strict code of ethics and don't believe in... (read more)

1Tasky14y

Sorry for double post. Actually I did think about this again and I think there is a way to almost disprove what I said above. I think what can and will be disproven is the idea of "Soul". Basically we already know about a lot of connections not only between brain and body function (like "which are is correlated to which operations") but we know some things about correlation brain-personality! (If you want a really good introduction on brain-mind correlations that is not overly technical, see "The Brain and the Inner World: An Introduction to the Neuroscience of Subjective Experience" by Marc Solms and Oliver Turnbull) So, first we have to ask us what scope the soul has. I think, that if the soul doesn't comprehend "personality", it is a totally useless concept. But then, on can disprove the existence of a soul distinct from the body: there are various cases of patients (the most notable, although probably not documented precisely enough is the one about Phineas Gage, 1823-1860) that due to damage in the brain (usually the frontal lobes) changed their personality in more or less dramatic ways. So one definitely has (or will have, if more of those kind of findings pop up) to relinquish the idea of a soul-matter duality. And there you have your whole worldview crumbling down. The only thing one could possibly believe in then, would be a god who created the universe. But if he isn't correlated to reality even after one's death or after the supposed apocalypse (what sense would that make if personality/soul was body-dependant?), then what difference does believing or not imply? and one definitely couldn't base morals or ethics on such an independent god...

Circular Altruism

Tasky14y00

I don't know if I understood your circular argument right, but you are basically saying that if 50 years of torture for one person (50yt1) < dustspeck for a googolplex (ds10^10^100) then 50yt1>49.9999999yt10^100>49.9999998yt10^200>...>ds10^10^100

if this is not what you are saying, then I don't understand your point and ask to elucidate it. if it is, then I think there is a serious flaw here: in the 50yt1 scenario, someone is suffering, i.e. feeling pain in the ds10^10^100 scenario, there is a mere annoyance. There has therefore to be a point... (read more)

Welcome to Less Wrong! (2010-2011)

Tasky14y50

Hello folks! I am a 18 year old italian Student who will start studying Mathematics in Germany this year. I was always interested in the way of the rational/scientific method, and since I remember tried to use it to reason about almost everything.

A month ago some friends showed me HPMoR, which I read in like 3 days and really enjoyed it. So finally I came here. I read some subsequences and various single topics, including a lot of the comments, which I found almost always very interesting.

This blog opened my eyes especially on cognitive biases thing. Often... (read more)

0Oscar_Cunningham14y

Welcome!

The Least Convenient Possible World

Tasky14y80

But as a doctor, probably you will have to choose non-randomly, if you want to stand by your utilitarian viewpoint, since killing different people might have different probabilities of success. Assuming the lest convenient possible world hypothesis, you can't make your own life easier by assuming each one's sacrifice is as likely to go well. So in the end you will have to assume that one patients sacrifice will be the "best", and will have to decide if you kill them, thus reverting to the original problem.

The Least Convenient Possible World

Tasky14y10

If it really is undecidable, God must be able to prove that.

However, I think an easier way to establish whether something is just your hallucination or a real (divine) being is asking them about something you couldn't possibly know about and then check if it's true.

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